At home

The last good month in the garden

In most of the country you plant in spring. In Las Vegas you plant now — and on November 1 the valley’s watering rules drop to one day a week. What goes in the ground this month, and how to set the controller before the switch.

If you moved here from somewhere with proper seasons, your instincts are backwards. In the Midwest you plant when the ground thaws. In the Mojave the summer is the hard season, and the kindest months for anything you put in the ground run from now until the first warm week of spring. Cooler soil, fewer insects, almost no weeds, and vegetables that taste sweeter for having grown slowly. The University of Nevada’s extension service has been calling autumn “an often-forgotten time to plant” in Southern Nevada for decades, and it is still right.

The catch is that the window is closing. The extension service’s cool-season planting range for seed runs roughly from the second week of August to the second week of October, so by mid-October you are at the tail of it. That is not a reason to skip the year. It is a reason to buy transplants rather than seed packets — the nursery has done the first six weeks for you — and to pick the crops that finish fast.

The soil is the project, not the plants

The valley’s native soil is high in salts and alkali and low in organic matter, and in a new-construction yard it has usually been compacted by a year of trucks as well. The extension service’s advice has not changed: clear the surface, then work four to six inches of compost into the bed before you plant anything. For a hundred-square-foot bed that is somewhere between one and two cubic yards — more than people expect, and the single biggest difference between a garden that limps and one that does not. A raised bed filled with bought soil skips the problem entirely, which is why you see so many of them behind Summerlin walls.

One thing to know before you build anything permanent in a new yard: in many new communities here the builder finishes the front yard to the community’s desert standard and hands over the back as bare dirt, and the HOA’s design guidelines then govern what you may put in it. Read those guidelines before you order the beds, and if you are weighing a water-smart landscape rebate, the last issue’s explainer on what the valley will pay you to remove is still current.

November 1: the controller switch

The Southern Nevada Water Authority runs a mandatory seasonal watering schedule, and it is calendar-based rather than weather-based. Through October 31 you may water on three assigned days a week. From November 1 through the end of February it is one assigned day a week, and that one-day limit applies to drip irrigation as well as sprinklers. Which day is yours depends on your watering group, A through F, which you can look up by address on the water authority’s site or find on your bill. Sunday is never a watering day in any season.

For anything you planted this month, the one-day rule is still enough. Mulch the beds, water deeply on your day, and let the cool weather do the rest. By the time the three-day schedule returns in March, you will be pulling garlic scapes and the first of the spring lettuce.

Before you rely on any of this

The watering schedule above is the water authority’s published seasonal calendar as it stood on October 15, 2026; Henderson, North Las Vegas and Boulder City publish their own versions, so confirm yours with your own provider. Planting windows shift a week or two from year to year with the first frost — the extension service’s fact sheet and the UNLV master-gardener calendar both carry month-by-month tables if you want to plan a specific crop.